Give Us a Gov’t Like All the Nations Around Us

There may be valid criticisms of the Trump (Ivanka as much as Donald) child care proposal, but The New York Times and the Huffington Post did not find them.

As is always the case with new proposed social spending, The New York Times chides the United States for being so very retrograde: “Within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a consortium of 35 countries, including the world’s wealthiest, the United States stands out as the only nation that does not already guarantee paid maternity leave.”

This is the familiar refrain: All other advanced countries do X; it’s embarrassing that the United States is the only country without nationalized health care, or paid leave, or universal preschool, etc., etc. During the Cold War, we were constantly hectored that while the Soviet Union didn’t have political freedom, it sure did provide economic freedom in the form of a guaranteed job, free health care, family leave and so forth. When the Soviet Union fell, we learned that its actual standard of living was the rough equivalent of Bangladesh’s, that Leningrad’s hospitals had raw sewage in the taps, and that no one except the Communist Party elite had ever seen a banana.

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